The Price is Right; Drew Carey is wrong.

“Candidate” Tim misses the bigger picture.  It’s not that not only is Drew Carey hardly a non-partisan figure, but he’s blatantly wrong.

According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Michael McIntyre, Carey’s entire documentary is that if Cleveland was more like Houston, everything would be hunky dory.

The series, reported and produced by reason.tv’s editor Nick Gillespie, explores problems in Cleveland and other rust belt cities and offers solutions using examples from other cities — such as Houston — that are enjoying success and population growth.

Bottom line? As the Web site’s motto reads, “Free minds and free markets.” In other words, move out of the way, government.

Here’s the list of the top ten downtown employers in Houston:

Largest downtown employers
Number of employees

Shell Oil Co.
5,744

Harris County
4,750

Exxon Mobil Corp.
4,420

City of Houston
4,000

JPMorgan Chase
3,000

Continental Airlines Inc.
2,824

Foley’s
2,500

U.S. Post Office
2,314

CenterPoint Energy Inc.
2,199

U.S. Government
2,100

“Government” is two of the top four, and four of the top ten employers.  “Move out government” and people will move out of Houston.

Maybe the next time Drew Carey is testing his ideological thinking via SimCity, he could simulate what would happen to a city like Houston if you took away the Johnson Space Center and the private sector jobs associated with it.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

About a decade ago, one of the largest private employers in Dallas was a company called Enron… until the evil government stepped in and began investigating it to death.  Drew Carey’s support of Ron Paul and his economic libertarianism would argue that we should have deregulated oversight over companies like Enron. 

Also, Dallas lags behind the nation in high school graduates.  That’s hardly a model for the Cleveland school system to emulate.

Drew Carey is a well-meaning guy, but I don’t take foreign policy advice from Alec Baldwin or economic development advice from Drew Carey.  I just don’t.